When you put your gun on in the morning and leave the house for the day, are you concerned about printing? The above picture was shared with me on Twitter. Taken by a man in a checkout line behind a woman whose firearm is only being thinly veiled by her light pink t-shirt, she could obviously care less about printing. It’s a topic of discussion I’ve had with several instructors and an issue I’ve had myself – should we be concerned with whether or not our gun “prints” through our clothing? Yes, but mostly because if you’re carrying concealed,...

As 3D printing continues to develop and evolve, we’ve begun to see it branch off quite a bit from the typical image of a machine depositing layers onto a flat build platform. 3D printing has been adapted to print onto preexisting objects, onto fabric, and in multiple directions. Machines capable of doing these fancy tricks are still rare and expensive, though, and not quite accessible to the average maker, but that may not be the case forever. A group of UK researchers recently published a paper about their efforts to develop an affordable system that can 3D print onto uneven,...

As the finale of the 2016 USA presidential election looms closer Donald Trump is easily beating Hillary Clinton amongst printing executives. A total of 62 per cent of printing executives in the USA are throwing their support behind Trump, while Clinton only managed to win just 28 per cent of respondents. According to a survey directed at industry executives, out of the four major industries polled, Trump managed to score the most votes from printers. In a white male-dominated industry, it is not surprising the majority of American printers have joined the Trump camp. Male voters are a crucial pillar...

Israeli 3D printer firm Nano Dimension has successfully lab-tested a 3D bioprinter for stem cells, paving the way for the potential printing of large tissues and organs, the company said on Wednesday. While 3D printers are used already to create stem cells for research, Nano Dimension said the trial, conducted with Israeli biotech firm Accellta Ltd, showed its adapted printer could make large volumes of high resolution cells quickly....

Question: Does anyone here know of an online map source who provides maps that are better suited for printing on modest price (or even B&W) printers, than the usual Google, Bing, etc., maps? Anyone who's ever printed out a map from the above sources knows what I mean. The printed maps are just too "washed out" or faded looking. I can capture maps from the above and copy them into an image or photo viewer like IrfanView to improve them somewhat, but even then, results are poor, and often one ends up using lots of toner for bodies of water,...

The new EcoTank printers cost more up front but can churn for years without running dry Epson's new printers change the ink-onomics of your home office. WSJ's Wilson Rothman explains why paying more will make your ink-cartridge hassles disappear. It was after midnight, and I was facing a ticking-clock real estate transaction. All I had to do was print 15 pages of black-and-white contract, sign it and fax it back. Only halfway through, my printer ran out of ink—magenta ink! Thus began a chain reaction culminating in my nearly throwing the printer out the window. I ended up at Kinko’s....

"If necessary, we will issue parallel liquidity and California-style IOU's, in an electronic form. We should have done it a week ago," said Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister. ... Syriza sources say the Greek ministry of finance is examining options to take direct control of the banking system ... They want a new team installed, one that is willing to draw on the central bank's secret reserves, and to take the provocative step in extremis of creating euros. "We have to restore stability to the system, with or without the help of the ECB. We have the capacity to print...

Another dimension: Professor Marc in het Panhuis and PhD student Shannon Bakarich are building objects using 4-D printing, where time is the fourth dimension. 4D printing is unfolding as technology that takes 3D printing to an entirely new level. The fourth dimension is time, shape shifting in fact, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) at the University of Wollongong is helping to set the pace in the next revolution in additive manufacturing. Just as the extraordinary capabilities of 3D printing have begun to infiltrate industry and the family home, researchers have started to develop 3D...

PHYS.Org ^ | 03-17-2015 | Provided by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A 3D printing technology developed by Silicon Valley startup, Carbon3D Inc., enables objects to rise from a liquid media continuously rather than being built layer by layer as they have been for the past 25 years, representing a fundamentally new approach to 3D printing. The technology, to appear as the cover article in the March 20 print issue of Science, allows ready-to-use products to be made 25 to 100 times faster than other methods and creates previously unachievable geometries that open opportunities for innovation not only in health care and medicine, but also in other major industries such as automotive...

The largest Bible printing factory in the world has printed its 125th million copy, the Financial Times reports. Based in Nanjing, China, the factory is run by the government-sanctioned Amity Foundation in conjunction with the Bible Society. It has produced over 65 million Bibles in ten different Chinese languages since 1987, in addition to more than 59 million in 90 other languages for exportation. Officially an atheist state, the right to freedom of religious belief is guaranteed under Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution but protections are limited to those who worship within state-sanctioned bodies. Chinese Christians often suffer at...

Last May, I covered the work of Defense Distributed with regard to its building of tools for individuals to 3D-print their own firearms in the post. Meet “The Liberator”: The World’s First Fully 3D-Printed Firearm, In it, I noted: 3D-printing, like decentralized crypto currencies, have the potential to change the world in which we live in extraordinary ways. Ways that are almost inconceivable at this point given we are so early in the game. More than anything else, these technologies can empower the individual like never before, and I think that is generally a very good thing. While all sixteen...

Fourteen-year-old Suvir Mirchandani found a way to save the federal and state governments almost $400 million from their yearly budgets just by changing the typeface they use on handouts. The best choice? Garamond! Mirchandani’s school was looking for ways to save money, but he noticed no one was paying attention to the ink used on its many handouts. He noticed that Hewlett-Packard printer ink is $75 an ounce, while an equivalent amount of French perfume is only $38. Here is how he came to the conclusion that Garamond is the best choice: Collecting random samples of teachers' handouts, Suvir concentrated...

Louisville Kentucky cardiothoracic surgeon Erle Austin has performed successful heart repair surgery on a 14 month old infant named Roland Lian Cung Bawi — heart surgery on such a young patient is not unheard of, of course, what's new is that Austin was able to map out his surgical approach using a nearly exact model of the patients heart—it had been printed on a 3D printer. Young Roland had been born with four congenital heart defects—doctors had known since before he was born that his heart had problems. Fixing them all would prove to be a challenge. When it came...

3D printing has been making waves in the manufacturing arena which is touted as the next big thing to revolutionise consumerism and product development. Just as e-commerce has removed the boundaries for marketing and brought the consumers and producers closer, 3D printing is expected to enlarge the market for producers by removing the shackles of production volumes, minimising the time to market and customising the product as per individual customer needs and all of this at affordable costs. In the early days of product creation, nuts, screws and hinges were individually hand-crafted for a very long time until the industrialisation...

Re-elected Republican presidents have generally presided over the best stock market returns, but the first year of President Barack Obama's second term could suspend that trend. The jump in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- 24 percent -- is the third-largest annual rally after a president was re-elected since the 1930s, according to Bloomberg. Only Bill Clinton's and Ronald Reagan's re-elections overlapped with bigger rallies. The S&P 500 index has grown 108 percent since Mr. Obama took office. And 2013, Bloomberg predicts, is on course to see the best stock market returns in a decade. On average, the stock...

A group of US scientists have created the world’s smallest human liver which can survive for forty days and works like the real thing – using a 3D printer. The mini-livers, made by California-based medical research company Organvo, are just half a millimetre deep and four millimetres wide but can perform most of the functions that a real liver can. The printer builds up 20 layers of hepatocytes cells, which carry out liver functions, along with two major types of liver cell. It also adds cells from the lining of a blood vessel. This allows the liver cells to receive...

Police chiefs today defended raiding a toy model shop and claiming they may have found the UK's first ever 3D printed firearm.The seizure, initially described as "a really significant discovery", was part of a much-heralded crackdown on organised crime, Operation Challenger, launched by Greater Manchester Police (GMP). But hours later it emerged GMP may have jumped the gun, releasing a second statement about the raid in which Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said: "We need to be absolutely clear that, at this stage, we cannot categorically say we have recovered the component parts for a 3D gun." The 38-year-old pony-tailed...

"The technological revolution may never end but it does pause from time to time. If investors are expecting the kind of returns that Apple achieved from 2007-2012, they are probably going to have to look elsewhere as smartphones and tablets are nearly commoditized. Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) should provide more successful products but that does not mean they will have an impact to the degree the iPhone and Android had on the lives of consumers and the economy. As when chips and desktops became commoditized after the tech bubble of the 90s, it may take a quantum leap in...

Tea, Earl Grey, hot. Those are the words spoken by Capt. Picard to the computer when he wants his favorite beverage replicated. While we're still a long ways away from that becoming reality, we're taking steps toward it. NASA will be taking that step when it takes a 3D printer up to the International Space Station in June 2014. MORE: How 3D Printing Will Save You

The long-term goal of this branch is to create functioning human organs some five or 10 years from now. While bioprinters at other institutions use one arm with multiple heads to print multiple materials one after the other, the UI device with multiple arms can print several materials concurrently. This capability offers a time-saving advantage when attempting to print a human organ because one arm can be used to create blood vessels while the other arm is creating tissue-specific cells in between the blood vessels. The first major goal is to make blood vessels. The next goal is to make...